For four books that show how critical issues of gender and race became to politics and social reform in the West, see:
Neil Foley, The White Scourge: Mexicans, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Texas Cotton Culture (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1997).
Ian Tyrrell, True Gardens of the Gods: Californian-Australian Environmental Reform, 1860-1930 (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press,1999).
A minority among the Knights wanted to include the Chinese. The Chinese, of course, could and did organize against employers.
Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 218.
David Montgomery, The Fall of the House of Labor: The Workplace, the State and American Labor Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), 67, 85
Powderly and the Knights leadership pressed against southern racism but not western racism.
F. J. Clark, J. P. Dalton, and A. G. Read, "Committee to General Assembly of Knights of Labor," in Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 216-17.
Bromley, Chinese Massacre, 38-39.
Chinese immigrants became, in the words of Mae Ngai, "simultaneously a social reality and a legal impossibility."
Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2004), 4.
After the massacre there were 547 Chinese and 85 whites as the company concentrated all of its Chinese employees in Wyoming at Rock Springs for protection.
D. O. Clark to Bromley, Oct. 28, 1885, UP, RG 2361, box 21, Labor Disputes, Oct. 1885.